skydiving

A photographer employed as a camera "flyer" at a skydiving company died after being critically injured in an accident.

Photographer Dustin Snipes recently did a project that takes light-painting photography to a whole new level. Teaming up with the Red Bull Air Force Team, he shot long-exposure photos of wingsuit skydivers falling to Earth while wearing sparkling pyrotechnics.

Adventure photographer Jesper Gronnemark recently did an impressive skydiving photo shoot using flashes and other studio equipment in midair while free-falling at 125 mph (~200 km/h).

A little while back, I was working for a small local newspaper outside of Houston, Texas. I was working on a series about adrenaline junkies around the area. One article I really wanted to write was about skydiving at Spaceland Houston.

Skydivers often photograph and film their jumps with a GoPro camera, but what happens if you want to shoot higher-quality photos with a DSLR? The solution is to mount it to your helmet and find a way to trigger the shutter.

Photographer Wolfgang Lienbacher demonstrated this recently by jumping out of a plane with the Red Bull Skydive team with a DSLR on his head and a shutter release cable in his mouth.

An interesting camera story developed over in Sweden this past week. A man named Kristoffer Örstadius reported online that his father had found a GoPro lying in a field outside of Kristianstad, Sweden. The memory card on the camera was intact, but the last video on it was surprising: it showed that the camera had taken an unexpected journey from 10,000 feet above ground four years earlier.

How in the world do you capture a photograph like the one above? Or any of the ones below for that matter? How do you deal with temperatures that run in the negative 50s Celsius, at an altitude where any real camera would likely mean breaking your skydiving videographer's neck, and still deliver great shots of an incredible feat of skydiving?

Well, it took a year and a half of preparation and the challenges were seemingly never-ending, but photographer Dom Daher figured it out, and he was kind enough to share his photos and some of what he learned with us.

GoPros seem to have captured every activity known to man, but this is the first time we've ever seen a dog fly. The footage is part of a National Geographic feature on adrenaline junkie Dean Potter, who brings his dog Whisper along for every crazy ride.

Apparently the newest, coolest way to show off your new camera is by sending it up with some professional skydivers and telling them to have at it. Okay, maybe it's too early to spot a trend, but Nikon did recently decide to follow in Sony's footsteps and send a couple of D5300s up with a pro skydive photographer to show them off.

Here's something crazy to help you shake off the gear fever all of this morning's announcements probably induced. This footage supposedly captures what a GoPro saw after it was dropped from a skydiving airplane, survived that several thousand foot fall, and landed smack in a pigpen where one of Babe's relatives tried to have it for lunch.

If there's a secret contest going on for most terrifying action camera video, then 25-year-old skydiver James Lee recently gave the skydivers in the mid-air plane crash a run for their money. In a terrifying video captured on the veteran skydiver's helmet cam, you see him get knocked unconscious just seconds after jumping, and then get rescued by his fellow skydivers.

There's no doubt the ubiquity of fake and mis-reported content on the Internet has turned many of us into big-time skeptics. Whenever we see something that seems incredible or outlandish, our knee-jerk reaction is to call it fake and begin searching for evidence of that fact, using our confirmation bias as a guide.

One video that elicited such a response from many of the people that saw it was this recent Sony ad that showed an a7R lens change happening in mid-air during a skydive.

A couple of weeks ago, we shared a video that showed a guy dropping his brand new $2,300 24-70mm f/2.8L lens as he demonstrates how to quickly swap your lenses out "just like the pros." Some people thought it was real, some thought it was fake, but whatever the case it definitely WAS a big fat fail.

That is 100% not the case with the epic Sony ad above, which is titled simply "A7R," but ought to be called "THIS is How You Change a Lens Like a Pro"... feel free to substitute "bada**" for "pro."

The kinds of stunts the rise of action cameras has allowed us to capture in POV are often scary, but more often than not they're also planned. However, for nine skydivers, the footage their helmet mounted GoPros captured recently wasn't planned in the least, and it will likely be the most terrifying thing you see all week... or month... or year.

On June 7th, 2007, a Delta II rocket blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Lompoc, California, carrying with it the Italian Thales Alenia-Space COSMO-SkyMed Satellite. And while the rocket was careening towards space, Staff Sgt. Eric Thompson (who was moving in the decidedly opposite direction) managed to snap this amazing photo.

On its own, the video above is horribly filmed and some of the most difficult-to-watch footage you'll ever see, but what it shows makes it fascinating. It's a point-of-view look at what it's like to fall 12,500 feet without a parachute... and survive. Skydiver Lucas Damm was jumping out of a plane over British Columbia recently when his helmet-mounted GoPro camera smacked against the plane door and fell out of its holder. The camera, still rolling, fell the entire way down and miraculously escaped without any damage.

To promote its new One X phone (and the camera on it), HTC came up with the bizarre idea of doing a skydiving fashion shoot with photography student Nick Jojola and model (and professional skydiver) Roberta Mancino. During the photoshoot above the Arizona desert, Jojola plummeted to Earth at 126MPH while Mancino whizzed by at 181MPH, giving the photographer a tiny window of 0.8 seconds to squeeze off the shot.

Melbourne-based design studio Betty Wants In captured some skydiving footage using a GoPro …

Aaron Gustafson, a Seattle-based artist, has become the first person to ever shoot large format photographs while skydiving. Using a custom large format helmet camera he designed himself, Gustafson made one large format photograph on each jump while traveling at speeds upwards of 130 miles per hour.